Fear Street: 1666

In cov­er­ing each entry in direc­tor Leigh Janiak’s inter­con­nect­ed Fear Street tril­o­gy as they drop week­ly on Net­flix, it’s been rel­a­tive­ly easy to be vague with plot details. That said, the fun and freaky final instal­ment, sub­ti­tled 1666, is near impos­si­ble to dis­cuss with­out spoil­ing some threads left dan­gling from parts one and two. So, to para­phrase Fear Street author RL Stine’s bet­ter-known hor­ror series, read­er beware…

At the close of the sec­ond film, the first film’s pro­tag­o­nist, Deena (Kiana Madeira), thought she’d end­ed the cen­turies-long curse of aveng­ing witch Sarah Fier by reunit­ing her sev­ered hand with her buried body. But when her own blood drips onto the remains, Deena is sub­con­scious­ly trans­port­ed back to 1666, short­ly before the area’s first hor­rif­ic mas­sacre and Sarah’s muti­la­tion and hang­ing for witchcraft.

Madeira plays Sarah in the 1666-set stretch of the film, though not as Deena pos­sess­ing her mind and body; occa­sion­al­ly we get flash­es of actor Eliz­a­beth Scopel, who plays the ​‘real’ Sarah. This artis­tic choice is seem­ing­ly done to draw com­par­isons with Deena’s plight in her own time­line, with her girl­friend Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) cur­rent­ly pos­sessed in 1994. The cen­tre­piece les­bian romance is one of the more refresh­ing ele­ments of this hor­ror series, and 1666 is the most explic­it­ly queer text of the tril­o­gy. It seems Sarah’s des­ig­na­tion as a sin­ner might have been due to her love of anoth­er woman, rather than dark magic.

The film’s pri­ma­ry set­ting may be a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent cen­tu­ry, but the device of hav­ing var­i­ous famil­iar faces return to play new char­ac­ters, some of whom are direct ances­tors of those they played ear­li­er in the tril­o­gy, can’t help but bring to mind Back to the Future Part III. That is height­ened fur­ther by most of the res­i­dents of ​‘Union’, as the town is known in 1666, hav­ing Irish accents, in the grand tra­di­tion of Michael J Fox as Sea­mus McFly.

Not to spoil when and how it hap­pens, but the film nat­u­ral­ly has to go back to the 1994 time­line at some point. And with that jump comes one of the trilogy’s fun­ni­est moments, the flash­ing of anoth­er title card: ​‘Fear Street 1994 Part 2’. Any film nerd who insists that the last title card to appear on screen is the real name of the movie will either be appalled or delight­ed by this devel­op­ment; a new entry in a canon that also fea­tures John Carter/​John Carter of Mars and It/​It Chap­ter One.

Speak­ing of It, that par­tic­u­lar Stephen King sto­ry comes across as a direct influ­ence on the excit­ing final act of this film. But while a grue­some super­nat­ur­al enti­ty below Shady­side is the phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of a town’s poi­son­ing across cen­turies, sum­mon­ing rean­i­mat­ed mur­der­ers for a final show­down with Deena and her rag­tag group of defend­ers, the cen­tral big bad fig­ure who has to be tak­en down to end the sys­temic rot for good is an all too human evil.